"Shot on 8mm on a mountain in Japan, the abrasive winds that drift the fog in Iimura's Kiri are so fierce we almost believe it to have grazed the filmstrip. The scratches, however, emerge as dust particles that submerge in and out of the mist. A comparative piece to Larry Gottheim's Fog Line...
One of the earliest minimalist video with flicker effects was produced in Tokyo in early 1970s. A flickering video with eyes, which super-impose the positive over the negative, open and close rapidly. At the same time the "blind" effects of video fast-forwarding accelerates/decelerates the picture...
Iimura analyzed some footage he had made in Katmandu of a man taking a bath in a sacred river. A meditational experience is, thus, presented in a film whose minimal action and quiet pace can create meditational possibilities for viewers -Scott MacDonald (Afterimage, April, 1978, N.Y.)
Models, Reel 2 (B-1~4) consists of four works and is dealt with, different from Reel 1, symbol/words, and the logic in film. First "Counting 1 to 100 or X" is made of four 100feet films and the number of 1 to 100 are replaced by multiplied (10, 20,40,80) Xs, which may be "read" as numbers through...
Shot on 8mm on the 12-day boat journey between Yokohama and San Francisco, Iimura's The Pacific Ocean consumes the anticipation and uncertainties of a voyage on waves with an obsessive attention on the ripples. (Julian Ross)
A document of Tatsumi Hijikata's Butoh dance with Kazuo Ohno as the guest dancer shot in Hijikata's early period when he was emerging as the originator of Butoh. All of the male dancers are dressed up with evening suits and move gracefully, yet an intruder breaks up the whole scene abruptly. The...
Yomiuri Independent was an annual show between 1949-1963 that exhibited all art that was submitted. Artists in the early 60s began to take advantage of the challenge by provoking the organisers with their submissions that cast a question on the framework of art within the gallery space. The objet...
The early sixteenth-century Japanese garden in the Zen temple of Ryoan-ji, in Kyoto, is considered a masterpiece of the karesansui or "dry landscape" style... In this film, the viewer is invited to experience the garden as an embodiment of ma, a Japanese concept that conveys both time and space......
Japanese Erotica: Five Films on Love and Sex from the Japanese Underground of the Experimental Cinema
01967HD
A program of five films on love and sex from the Japanese underground of the experimental cinema, assembled by avant-garde cineaste Takahiko Iimura, and shown at the American Cinematheque from January 19 to 25, 1967.
Originally filmed in 8mm a little stone-made Buddha in a temple of Katmandu, the film strip in ten seconds was projected as a loop, and then the screen w as refilmed many times in 16mm at different speeds (frames per second). The original 8mm footage has been greatly expanded through refilming in...
When I came to the USA in the mid 1960s, it was the high point of the Hippie movement and the black riots. I lived in the East village in New York, which was a center of the former, and watched TV news of the latter often. These two films, Film Strips I and II, were taken from the scenes...
“ONAN is a work about desire (masturbation) which has no object but itself. The appearance of the large egg objectifies the man's desires. After colliding with the other (a girl), the hero falls down while still holding the egg, thus caricaturing the desire of the hero.” —Takahiko Iimura...
"The original film was rescued from a Tokyo trash bin. It is an American sexual education film in which plant and animal sex are explained. I, together with an artist friend, Natsuyuki Nakanishi, punched big holes in almost all of the frames. It was a protest against Japanese censorship of explicit...
A portmanteau of two films about Uluru (then known as Ayres Rock). "A huge isolated rock in the midst of desert in Australia: Ayers Rock. I produced two films around this rock; however, the method of the filming are different. The first, "Moments At The Rock," shot with an amateur video camera,...
'What I am concerned with in this film is not only the flicker effect, but also the coming and going of an eye-like shape on screen which was created by a fade-in-out device while shooting the light/the bulb of the projector. The viewer literally looks into the light which acts like an eye.'(T.I.)
